Last week's failure of Macalester's e-mail server made communication among students difficult and resulted in significant inconveniences, according to students.

"My group for international politics was writing a big paper and we spent probably about a day trying to send parts of the paper until finally we exchanged outside e-mail addresses," Andy Haug '06 said.

Other students experienced similar problems due to extreme slowness and the eventual take-down of the server. Several students described an inability to receive or send important e-mails.

According to Computer and Information Technology Network Administrator Ted Fines, CIT started to realize something was wrong when Mulberry began acting "horribly slow, almost unusable. It looked like the processor was busy all time," he said.

Finally, the CIT staff realized that the disk array that processes up to 30,000 messages per day was not functioning to its full capacity. Staff members added a second disk array and solved the problem.

Fines said that this particular problem is not likely to happen again, unless the mail volume increases to near 60,000 e-mails a day.

Fines admits that there is little hope that students who lost e-mail during the slowdown will be able to recover their messages. "I know nobody's happy about it," he added.

While Fines says this sort of problem is not likely to happen again, Haug wishes students could have more notice before similar problems occur. "If we knew it was going to happen we could have fixed the problem right away. We kept trying again and again, hoping it would work and it never did," Haug said. "But I don't know if they can predict when these things are going to happen."

In addition to the recent e-mail problems, students have mentioned similar problems over the winter break. "Over break, my roommate e-mailed me with her Macalester e-mail but Mulberry wouldn't let me respond. I had to create a new e-mail address to talk to her," said Jessica Fisher-Harkins '06.

Bri Farley '06 had a similar dilemma. "I was supposed to get a ride home from the airport and they couldn't e-mail me to set up the ride," she said "I had to take a freaking taxi!" Farley added.

While the CIT staff is working to ensure that problems associated with the e-mail system do not reoccur, Macalester students, faculty and staff should not rule out the possibility of such problems affecting their ability to communicate via e-mail in the future.